RE: NANFA-L-- freshwater mollusc pages

Crail, Todd (tcrail-in-UTNet.UToledo.Edu)
Fri, 25 Nov 2005 17:38:02 -0500

That's what makes many of Ohio's streams appealling. Most everything was
scraped well into the bedrock and are very young. Where it wasn't, it was
folded bedrock, so even major rivers are only 2 feet deep midsummer because
all our water is very very surface oriented, and due to deforestation, is
seriously flashy when there is recharge. We don't have the truly deep
streams... Even the Ohio River used to be a big series of bars until they put
the navigation locks in. I always used to laugh while reading In-Fisherman
magazine when they'd show 5 ft deep flats with 25 ft deep river holes in their
diagrams. Is the Maumee even 5 feet deep anywhere in August lol? Sooooo not
Ohio rivers :)

So you can basically walk into a large riffle with a bag, and walk out with
all the threeridge and flutedshell you want. It's not going to be someone
obvious. It could be their 9 and 12 year old while dad is fishing with a rod
n reel upstream. "Just took the kids out for the day... Sorry they wanted to
pick up all these old clams. Won't happen again." Right?

I had another thought. We don't see any of the crime reports for poaching
because the arrests all take place in KY. They let them cross state lines
which violates the Lacey Act and gets a whole lot more stickier litigation
involved. Still, it really guffs you off when you read someone got busted for
like 7000 valves and then gets a $1,000 fine and that was the max. And you
didn't even hear about it from your paper, because the arrest was in some
other state.

In short. The more people that know about the mussels, the more people know
the plight of the mussels, the more suspicious people are of people doing
anything with the mussels. I think the high richness-in-the earlier mentioned
Mackey Ford Access is because people in the area are knowledgeable about the
streams due to the Darby Creek Association and TNC around Columbus. I've been
questioned twice on separate occassions what it was I was doing, who I was
doing it for, etc etc. These are just people in the parking lot, one guy was a
high school biology teacher who did stream monitoring, the other guy was a
good ol' boy there to let his beagles chase birds ;)

Todd

________________________________

From: owner-nanfa-l-in-nanfa.org on behalf of Bruce Stallsmith
Sent: Fri 11/25/2005 3:25 PM
To: nanfa-l-in-nanfa.org
Subject: RE: NANFA-L-- freshwater mollusc pages

Yeah, TN and KY mussel poachers are regionally famous. A cash-on-delivery
market exists for shells like washboards. Most of the poachers are kind of
pathetic guys, doing dangerous dives with really broke-down equipment in the
lower Tennessee drainage. I can only imagine that they stand out when they
inflict themselves upon Ohio.
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